Meanwhile, in Montana, Citizens United Need Not Apply

DES MOINES — It was more than a passing relief to discover that there's serious political news occurring in places other than here in Iowa, and involving people other than the current Republican presidential field — although, as has been made painfully clear to everyone in this state who owns a TV set or has a radio in their car, the impact of the Citizens United decision on our politics is enough to make anyone with eyes and ears arrange to send flowers to the Montana Supreme Court. Even a dissenting justice felt compelled to issue a stinging rebuke to the Roberts Court, LLC:

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"While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the [U.S.] Supreme Court's decision," wrote Justice James C. Nelson, in his dissent. "And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it. For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield enormous power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins: the transition is seamless and overlapping."

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Justice Nelson then went out of his way to put paid to the idiotic concept of corporate personhood:

"While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in law," Nelson began, "I find the concept entirely offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons."

And this was in dissent from the decision.

The best part about this decision is that it's based on laws passed by Montana to correct the depredations wrought by the unholy marriage of corporate and political power the last time we had a Gilded Age. And they did it by whacking around the extraction industries, so beloved of the free-marketeers presently gallivanting through the cornfields out here, all of whom seem enormously nostalgic for the days of the robber barons and the cotton kings. (Newt Gingrich, the famous historian, has openly pined for the days before child labor laws.) As the majority said in its decision:

"The question then, is when in the last 99 years did Montana lose the power or interest sufficient to support the statute, if it ever did," the majority said. "We think not. Issues of corporate influence, sparse population, dependence upon agriculture and extractive resource development, location as a transportation corridor, and low campaign costs make Montana especially vulnerable to continued efforts of corporate control to the detriment of democracy and the republican form of government."